Even with a big star like Angelina Jolie, A Mighty Heart is not performing too well at the box office (less than $8 million in two weeks). For most releases, such disappointment would signal the end of a theatrical run. However, instead of pulling the film completely and hoping for better business on video, Paramount Vantage is attempting to jumpstart its battery. This weekend the studio is removing A Mighty Heart from many of its screens, dropping its theater count from 1,350 down to 651. Basically the film has been taken out of markets it isn't doing so well in; now maybe the buzz will grow in stronger areas and later the film can go back to a wider release. Even in the limited release, though, the film is bound to face strong competition from other well-received indies like Sicko, Once and La Vie en rose. Still, Paramount Vantage is going to really push this one in hopes that it will eventually find its audience. Paramount is also pushing for a heavy awards campaign for A Mighty Heart, and so it probably wants the slow buildup and long run kind of success that Crash achieved two years ago. The studio is still planning for the film's DVD to come out in time for Oscar voters.

I still haven't seen A Mighty Heart, but I had planned on going last night. Unfortunately, my local theater didn't have a showtime between 5:15pm and 10:30pm because it shares a screen with La Vie en rose (it seems Transformers is hogging most of the screens, even in NYC). So, instead I finally saw Knocked Up. Because I'm such a tardy moviegoer, I have to appreciate strategies where a movie is allowed long-term play. I still need to see Sicko and La Vie en rose and Once and many others that will hopefully be around for awhile. If only more distributors could recognize people like me who don't contribute to opening weekend grosses and would let other well reviewed movies stick around a little longer.

Last week's Manhattan junket for A Mighty Heart was fairly routine -- not at all a paparazzi circus, despite the fact that that press had known days in advance that Angelina Jolie was making the Waldorf Astoria her home base while in town to do publicity for the film. For those who are interested, I was never asked to sign any kind of agreement or contract whatsoever, and none of the other journalists doing roundtable interviews were, either. I think that kind of thing was restricted to journalists doing one on one interviews. The only out-of-the-ordinary thing that happened during the entire day was that the studio publicists made a big show of setting up their own tape recorder to record our conversation with Jolie, for what purpose I have no idea. Anyway, here is a sampling of some of the questions and answers batted back and forth during the roundtables. Some of the questions are mine, some are from the rest of the table. Enjoy.

Angelina Jolie

Playing a character who is not only real but also very involved -- what pressure does that put on you as an actress?

Huge pressure. So much so that I didn't sleep the night before and I questioned myself through the entire process of making this film. I respected her before I met her, when I saw how she handled the situation, just as a viewer watching CNN, and when I met her I discovered what a lovely woman, what a gracious person she is, what a great mom she is, and she's the last person I'd want to disappoint in any way. It was a huge responsibility to not just try to be her in the film, but to be her during the most difficult time of her life and to try to interpret her pain or her love for her husband. She had faith in me, that I would be the right person to do it, and I think without that I would never have taken the role.

What was your first meeting with her like?

Our initial meeting was before the film. We just had a play date. [laughs] The film was very much a second thought in our relationship. She was somebody who I liked as a woman and still think ... we have different things that in common that we want to work on internationally and domestically, and our kids like each other. So that's the most important reason for our friendship -- we get the kids together. It's strange for that to have evolved and for me to sit with her one day and to realize that we were going to do this and I was going to play her. It was strange -- it was very strange. She was wonderful. There's no vanity, and just believed that if everybody understood the book and understood the intention and why she lived her life the way she did, and what she and Danny represented, that if we understood that, then we would do our best and try. And as long as everybody tried their best, that was all she could ask. So she was the nicest person to work with, but because she had faith in us, it also made us that much more nervous.

A Mighty Heart takes an enormous gamble, and sinks or swims by it -- it tries to engage us in a meticulous police procedural, the outcome of which is already known to anyone watching the film. The film begins its action about an hour or so after Wall Street Journal South Asia bureau chief Daniel Pearl leaves his pregnant wife Mariane alone in their Karachi apartment to go to a meeting with a shady figure known as Sheik Gilani, who he suspects may have information on the 'shoe bomber' Richard Reid or may himself be a key terrorist figure. Like Daniel, Mariane is a journalist, and the two of them follow a strict procedure of regular call-ins when the other is off on a dangerous assignment. When Daniel misses one of these check-ins, Mariane springs into action, first reporting him missing to Pakistani authorities and later, to American agencies and the Wall Street Journal. Various players begin to flood into the apartment and the story, each of them taking somber mood cues from the tightly-wound, no-nonsense Mariane.

As Mariane, Angelina Jolie totes around a giant belly and a big pile of hair and sinks into the role of a traffic coordinator, constantly gauging the progress of the ad-hoc investigation into Daniel's disappearance and shuffling the other characters in and out of the main action. Early on, she creates a tree diagram on a blackboard to get a sense of where Daniel was going when he was abducted and who might have knowledge of his whereabouts. Pictures of 'persons of interest' are slapped up and yanked down. The movie demands your full attention as it unspools reams of information: names, places, events, and questions that must be answered if the crime will be foiled. I'm sure this is a true reflection of those sleepless weeks as Mariane Pearl remembered them in her book, but the sheer tonnage of investigative info A Mighty Heart presents us ends up crowding out Mariane and Daniel as people: their habits, their convictions, their unusual way of life. I know as little about those things now as I did before seeing the film.

Hope Davis has had a pretty remarkably consistent career considering the amount of work she's done, giving understated performances in a variety of great films. I loved her in two recent little-seen gems: The Matador and The Weather Man, and especially in American Splendor and About Schmidt -- which is one of my favorite films. She's got two movies due out this year: John August's The Nines, which I told you a bit about here, and Charlie Bartlett, a comedy with Robert Downey, Jr, due out August 3rd. Today brings more word on two upcoming projects for Davis. First, she has joined Synecdoche, New York, screenwriter extraordinaire Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut. Philip Seymour Hoffman will star and Davis joins an excellent (and very pale!) female supporting cast that includes Samantha Morton, Catherine Keener, Michelle Williams, and Tilda Swinton. Hoffman will play "a theater director in crisis over work and the women in his life," Davis will play his therapist. Synecdoche begins shooting this month.

After that project wraps, Davis will move on to Genova, a new film from Michael Winterbottom, director of the great Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story and 24 Hour Party People. Winterbottom also directed Angelina Jolie in A Mighty Heart, out this summer -- check out James' Cannes review of that film here. Monika told you about Davis' addition to the Genova cast last week. That film is a ghost story said to have mystery and horror elements. It tells the story of "a British man who moves with his two American daughters to Italy as he tries to recover from his wife's death." Davis will star alongside Colin Firth, Willa Holland of The OC and Perla Haney-Jardine of Spider-Man 3. Catherine Keener is in that one as well -- maybe she and Davis can share a cab from New York to Italy after the Kaufman film wraps.

I wouldn't imagine that Michael Winterbottom (In This World; The Road to Guantanamo) is always good about getting the necessary permits and legal permissions when he's filming in foreign lands. Considering his practice of using small crews that can get in and out of locations easily, he probably works on too much of a whim. But for his next film, A Mighty Heart, which stars Angelina Jolie as the widow of slain journalist Daniel Pearl, and is being produced by Brad Pitt's production company, Winterbottom is probably going to have to follow more of Hollywood's practices with on-location shoots.

But this weekend, four security guards who were cast to play police officers in Heart, were arrested in Karachi, Pakistan, for unauthorized impersonation. Ali Mohammad, Amin, Mohammad Akram and Zahid Hussain were taken into custody by the Saddar Town police after the four men were spotted in police uniform, acting like police in front of the Sindh High Court. According to the report, the filmmakers had not gotten permission to shoot there or to have the "actors" portraying police officers.

From what I've heard, this film shouldn't be shooting yet. Considering there's no mention in the report of Winterbottom being on the scene, I am hoping that more details surface. Has the director in fact begun already? Was this a second-unit crew picking up some pre-production shots without proper documentation? And what will Brad Pitt's role be in the case? Or is this perhaps not related to Winterbottom's film at all? There is another Daniel Pearl movie, you know.

The Road to Guantanamo is a thoroughly engrossing, sufficiently cathartic, but frustratingly one-sided indictment of the American military's appalling treatment of foreign "enemy combatants".  Michael Winterbottom (coming off Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, which might have been inexcusably silly if it hadn't been unbelievably dull), co-directed with longtime collaborator Mat Whitecross, and the two combine documentary-style interview footage with haunting, disturbing, and surprisingly beautiful reenactments, to tell the story of the Tipton Three -- three British-born Muslims mistaken for Taliban and imprisoned at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for over two years. Winterbottom, the renowned directorial chameleon whose other art house oddity of 2005 was the concert film/episodic porn 9 Songs, proves once again that if anyone is better at polarizing an audience, nobody does it with more style. He's got a potentially stunning piece of propaganda on his hands here -- it's just too bad he hasn't made a better film.

• Michael Winterbottom's controversial Berlin hit The Road to Guantanamo has been picked up for American distribution by Roadside Attractions, who plan to give the film its US premiere at Tribeca, and have it in theaters this summer. None of that multi-platform release action for this side of the Atlantic, but at least we get to see the thing.

• Did you know that Clint Eastwood has nine kids? And that one of them is an actor named Scott Reeves? Neither did I. Of course, if his Scott Reeves is the one the IMDB (there are actually two, but since one was born in 1966, I'm assuming he wouldn't be able to play a troubled teen), he's been in exactly one movie, so perhaps calling him an "actor" is going a bit far. Whatever his title, Reeves is joining the cast of P.D.R., as is Evan Ross, who will be making his debut in ATL later this month (and has apparently decided that it's a good career move to only appear in movies with three letter titles).

•  Man alive - Catherine Hardwicke's Nativity just gets better and better. In addition to its interesting story and kickass director, the movie's also got a cast with some serious acting chops. Already set to star is Oscar nominee Keisha Castle-Hughes, and Variety reports this morning that Shohreh Aghdashloo, Oscar-nominated for her supporting work in House of Sand and Fog, has been signed to play Saint Elizabeth (for those of you who are with me in heathen-dom, she's John the Baptist's mom).